Join two Russian and one Indian peace and disarmament movement leaders for an in-depth discussion of US-Russia relations, India-Pakistan relations, and the challenges to peace posed by each.
The speakers are in the U.S. to participate in the “Growing Nuclear Risks in a Changing World” conference in New York on May 4.
Boris Kagarlitsky, born in Moscow in 1958, was a dissident and political prisoner in the USSR under Brezhnev, then a deputy to Moscow city council (arrested again in 1993 under Yeltsin). Since 2007, he has run Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements in Moscow, a leading Russian leftist think tank. He is the editor of the online magazine Rabkor, author of numerous books, of which the two most recent to appear in English are Empire of the Periphery (Pluto) and From Empires to Imperialism(Routledge). He is an associate of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam and a contributor to The Nation magazine.
Oleg Bodrov graduated from the Physics & Mechanical faculty of Leningrad Polytechnic University in 1976 and worked on testing nuclear reactor units. After a visit to the Chernobyl contaminated area (Autumn 1986) on an investigatory mission, and the state’s limitation of dissemination of information about nuclear safety and its impact to the environment, he joined the environmental movement. The focus of his activities is the promotion of a nuclear free future, nuclear and environmental safety, renewable energy and energy saving on the basis of public participation and involvement of all stakeholders in decision-making process. He is the producer and director of eight video-documentaries about decommission challenges and positive international decommission experience. Oleg Bodrov is the author of a monograph and dozens of scientific and socio-political articles.
Achin Vanaik is a retired Professor of “International Relations and Global Politics” in the Political Science Department of Delhi University. He has authored or edited 12 books ranging from studies on contemporary India’s politics/economy/foreign policy to matters of religion, secularism, communalism and nationalism to issues of international politics and nuclear disarmament. He is a founder-member of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament and Peace (CNDP), India, a member of the Indian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (InCACBI), and have repeatedly been invited as a panelist at international conferences organized by the ‘UN Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People’ first set up in 1975. He is a Fellow of the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam). He was co-recipient of the Sean MacBride International Peace Prize for the year 2000 given by the International Peace Bureau, the world’s oldest international peace organization, for work and activities for South Asian and global nuclear disarmament.